


to the stars and back (with you)

by queenspacegay



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Ghost Drifting, I have taken exactly one (1) plot point from uprising and the rest is just me doing my own thing tbh, M/M, The Drift (Pacific Rim), fondness™, not the uprising we deserved but the one we needed, possessed Newt - Freeform, space, uprising turn your location on I just want to talk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 13:55:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16788256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenspacegay/pseuds/queenspacegay
Summary: Six months, four days and eighteen hours after the breach was closed and the apocalypse officially ended, Hermann’s stomach dropped so hard Newt felt it from the other side of their shared lab.Hermann discovers a second breach opened up in outer space and the PPDC send them along with a skeleton crew to investigate and potentially destroy it.





	to the stars and back (with you)

Six months, four days and eighteen hours after the breach was closed and the apocalypse officially ended, Hermann’s stomach dropped so hard Newt felt it from the other side of their shared lab. The ghost drift didn’t tend affect them so strongly anymore. They couldn’t really feel each other’s emotions normally - not like they could in those first few hours still fresh out of the drift - but they got impressions sometimes, almost like an aftertaste of an emotion rather than the real thing. But if an emotion was strong enough, like now, it would sometimes break through.

Newt sat up straight, specimen under the microscope completely forgotten.

“Hermann? What’s wrong?” Dread that didn’t belong to him crept into the back of his skull.

Hermann was staring at his screen, frozen in place. He didn’t seem to have heard Newt so he tried again; “Herms? What’s happened?” He crossed the lab, approaching his desk and placing a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“It can’t be,” Hermann said weakly, “it’s not possible.” Newt’s own dread curled in the pit of his stomach, mixing with the residue of Hermann’s and gnawing away at his insides. He didn’t need Hermann to tell him what had happened anymore. He could feel it in his gut.

“It has to be an error,” Hermann said, more force behind his voice this time. He snapped to attention, pulling up scans and charts and reading the relevant parts each three times over.

“What is it?” He asked, some naïve part of him praying his instinct was wrong. That it wasn’t caused by Hermann’s knowledge bleeding into his and was just paranoia, but-

“An anomaly in space - within our solar system. It matches-” He broke off, turning to look at Newt with fear in his eyes, “Newton, it matches the signature of the breach,”

“It can’t, that’s not possible,” Newt shook his head. But that wasn’t true, was it? The nightmares he’d been having post drift, where the precursors whispered words he couldn’t quite cling onto once awake, had been getting more frequent and more intense for weeks now. He’d barely slept these past few nights, it felt like something was coming. He’d tried to brush it off, say it was a delayed bout of anxiety hitting him, but he couldn’t shake the feeling.

Newt declaring Hermann’s findings weren’t possible would, under normal circumstances, have triggered an argument spanning anywhere between a few minutes (usually under the eye of Pentecost to step in once it got really heated), to several hours, and had once or twice devolved into the pair pelting each other with chalk and scrunched up balls of paper across the lab.

Hand shaking only slightly, Hermann tapped a few buttons on the control panel and after a few seconds Marshal Herc Hansen’s stern face appeared on the screen.

“Sir, please would you come down to the lab,” Hermann said.

“I’m busy, Gottlieb, can this wait?”

“No, it really can’t.”

The two minutes it took Herc to walk down to the lab was spent in tense silence, the only sound was Hermann’s clicking away on the keyboard as he checked and rechecked the data. Newt sat on the edge of the workbench, left thigh pressed into the edge of Hermann’s seat and right one jiggling up and down, staring into space and chewing on his thumb. Normally Hermann would complain he was disrupting his work, but now he seemed too distracted. Or maybe the physical closeness was as grounding to him as it was to Newt. They’d been pretty tactile before the drift, which had often confused and surprised people, but after it they were practically glued at the hip.

Finally, Herc strode through the door.

“This had better be important, Gottlieb,” He said wearily.

Hermann told him about the anomaly he’d discovered. He didn’t make eye contact the entire time, instead staring at his screen or the wall to Herc’s left. He kept his tone level and professional, so at odds with Newt’s typical approach of screaming new information, or even his own passionate rants that Pentecost had learned to just put up with. You lock a couple of scientists away together in a rusty lab with no windows and hardly any contact with the outside world for long enough and they’re bound to eventually devolve into the mad variety.

When he was finished explaining, Herc’s face was a perfectly blank mask. He grilled Hermann on his findings in a sharp, to the point manner, which Hermann had to admit he appreciated. When there was no more to be said, he thanked Hermann and left.

Hermann let out a shaky breath into the thick silence that had descended on the lab and leaned ever so slightly into Newt’s thigh, still pressed up against his chair. Newt wanted to say something to reassure Hermann, but if this really was a second breach so soon after they’d managed to close the first one-

They’d been so close to freedom, to a future where they didn’t have to live in a perpetual state of fear and exhaustion from overworking. They’d been so close to having a future at all. Having that snatched away now, when they were just starting to wrap their heads around a real life, was almost crueller than if they’d never got the taste at all.

  
“Doctors,” Herc said, nodding to the pair when they arrived into his office several days later. “Please take a seat. As I’m sure you’re aware, the PPDC has been granted funding to send a craft into space to survey the breach Doctor Gottlieb discovered on Tuesday. This will be a manned mission; if there is to be an attack, we want to be out there ready for it before it can reach earth. This also gives us the opportunity to gather information close-up and first hand, rather than relying on a probe, where we would be unable to fix anything should it go wrong,

“I’ve called you here today to ask you to both to be a part of this mission. I’m sure you can understand why you’re the obvious option here and I don’t need to elaborate.”

“Yes, sir,” Hermann said, stiff and awkward as always around authority.

“Long as you don’t ask me to drift with one again,” Newt laughed rather woodenly. Hermann knit his eyebrows together, but Newt got the feeling it was in confusion at the oddly placed comment, rather than out of distaste for his (apparently) unprofessional attitude.

  
The breach was closely monitored in the following months while the starship was built and prepped for the mission. The PPDC had a history of unrealistically fast turnarounds in creating the jaegers, and it seemed this mission would be no different. Energy fluctuations had been reported from the breach but other than that, thankfully, no activity as of yet.

Before they knew it, Newt and Hermann were strapped into a shuttle along with a bunch of the other crew, due to board the PPDC Stella Navis. Hermann was sat quietly trying to read a scientific paper on his pad but Newt was sat next to him bouncing both knees up and down and fiddling with anything he could get his hands on.

Hermann was well used to Newt’s utter inability to be still for a single moment by now, but he was fidgeting far more than usual. He tugged at the seat straps, played around with the drop-down table latch, fiddled with his bracelets, legs jiggling the whole while. There was an odd sense of dread creeping into Hermann’s chest that he’d been struggling to place until- ah. Newton was afraid of flying. For all his rock star bravado, and extensive knowledge of space travel (nowhere near as in depth as Hermann’s of course, but Newt was a mad scientist at heart so had always had a soft spot for space exploration, and had spent the last month reading up on every aspect of this mission he could get his hands on), he was anxious at the prospect of flying.

Newt had begun to worry at the skin under his bracelets now, scratching his thumbnail back and forth across the colourful skin while playing with the leather. Hermann reached out and took ahold of his wrist, guiding it gently but sternly down to the armrest separating them.

“Stop that.” He said, but didn’t remove his hand. Instead, he stroked his thumb across Newt’s pulse point softly, hoping to somehow bleed his calm through the ghost drift to smother the transferring worry. Newt deflated slightly, limbs stilling. He glanced at Hermann, expression warm and thankful.

The engines rumbled to life and Newt’s right knee began bouncing again, but Hermann squeezed his wrist and slipped his hand downwards so their fingers could intertwine. Newt squeezed his hand back, and looked straight ahead, other hand gripping the armrest, but thankfully not taking back up the fiddling.

Hermann ignored the look Mako gave him, glaring back at her when she laughed quietly. He was only holding Newt’s hand to reassure him. Physical contact can be very grounding, especially between drift partners, and Newt’s fidgeting had been distracting. That was all.

Newt tensed as the shuttle took off, pushing them back into their seats. Hermann rubbed his thumb soothingly over his knuckles. Newt looked over to him again, eyebrows knit with worry but a grateful smile tugging at his lips.

  
The ship wasn’t quite as sleek and modern sci-fi had promised. Of course, space travel was more common place these days, though had been less of a priority during the war. Newt knew the reality of space travel, but hadn’t been able to help himself from imagining slick paneling and white corridors. But there was no reason to make a ship designed for scientific research and prepped for space battle a luxurious, aesthetically pleasing craft. The reality was that clunky, garish buttons and switches were far easier to fix if broken, and to use in an emergency situation or in an EVA suit should that become necessary.

The corridors of the ship looked unnervingly like those at the Shatterdome; all dark metal and functional piping, but it was slightly curved. The ship created artificial gravity by spinning, in much the same way peas would stick to the bottom of a bucket you swung around in science class as a child. The members of the Stella Navis were stuck to the floor by its rotation around the center shaft, which stayed stationary and as such had no gravity. To get to other parts of the ship without walking the long way around, you would have to float through it. This meant the stars outside the observation windows were always seemingly moving in an arc around the ship. It was a good thing neither scientist got motion sickness.

Newt had been overseeing the transportation of some of his specimens so had left Hermann to find the lab first and caught up with him a few hours later. He let out a huffed laugh when he finally stepped into the lab. It was practically identical to the one back on earth, complete with a grouchy physicist and ridiculous chalkboard.

“Y’know they’ve invented these amazing things called whiteboards,” Newt says by way of greeting. “Or computers! Fascinating things,”

“Even in outer space I can’t get away from you,” Hermann grumbled from across the room where he was organising papers and equipment huffily. “Nor, it seems, your ridiculous specimens,” He jabbed his cane towards the tank containing the baby kaiju brain they’d drifted with those months ago. They’d somehow managed to salvage it from rotting, Hannibal Chau had been right; flood the skull with ammonia and it’ll survive long enough to dump it in a big glass tank of formaldehyde.

“Hey, don’t talk shit about Alice!” Newt said indignantly, “She helped us win the first war, maybe she’ll help us win this one too,”

“Oh lord, he’s named it,” Hermann said to the ceiling, pinching the bridge of his nose. He finished rustling with his papers and grabbed something from a nearby drawer.

“Oh, really Hermann? We’re not past the yellow tape?”

“Until you can learn to keep your specimens to your side of the lab, or the PPDC realises what a biohazard you are and gives me my own lab like I very well deserve-”

“Oh, I’m a biohazard now? Why are you the one who deserves his own lab?”

“I have ten years’ experience, I shouldn’t be forced to share-”

“Ten years’ experience ladies and gentlemen!” Newt announced to the otherwise empty lab, spreading his arms wide mockingly.

“You do realize if I got my own lab that would also mean you would get your own?” Hermann said sharply.

“Yes, thank you Hermann, I did make it past kindergarten,”

“Really? I wouldn’t have guessed it actually, your surprising ineptitude for math- or really anything that isn’t dead and decaying-”

“Gentlemen!” A familiar, stern voice called out behind them. “This is a relatively small ship, we can’t afford you the space for a lab each as you well know. You’ve been sharing a lab for the past ten years I think you can handle another few months, or is that too much to ask of you?” Herc said. He wasn’t really frustrated, he’d worked with the two scientists long enough to know bickering was their love language, even if the two denied it vehemently.

“No, sir,” Hermann said, snapping to attention. Newt rolled his eyes.

“Good. I hope everything is in order in here?”

“Yes sir, everything is acceptable,”

“Well really, I could do with far more specimens, I don’t know how you expect me to continue my research when I don’t have any access to fresh samples for this entire trip and only have a handful to start with, unless we’re expecting a surplus around the breach which for starters we have no evidence of being active and secondly we don’t even know if we’ll be able to kill any yet seeing as we don’t know whether whatever comes out of there are even going to be kaiju,”

“Doctor Geiszler, we have provided you with everything we are able as you well know. If you’d like to make a formal request for more samples I’ll be sure to pull them right out of my ass for you.”

Newt smirked and held up his hands in surrender.

“Now I expect both of you to work together like grownups, please. This is a small ship and noise carries. Also Carol swears she’ll quit if she receives any more complaints from you two so for the love of god try to get on.”

“Yes sir,” Hermann said again, “please excuse my colleague’s insolence,” he shot a withering glare at Newt, “he’s well aware of the situation.”

“I should hope so. Good day.” Herc said, and turned to leave.

When he was safely out of ear shot, Newt rounded on Hermann.

“Oh, is that your ass?” He scrunched up his face and made disgusting kissing noises, “Closer to the hole sir?”

“Just because I have some respect for our superior officers!”

“We’re not officers!”

“He is still our superior!”

“You don’t have to act so stuffy around him though, well I’m not sure you actually could act less stuffy if you tried, maybe this is just your natural state of being,”

“And you don’t have to be so disrespectful and childish,”

The bickering continued while they measured out the halfway point in the lab (“I don’t see why you should get a whole half of the lab, physics is a theoretical science all you need is your stupid chalk boards and computers, I need actual space for my work!” “I need a safety zone so my work doesn’t get contaminated by yours.”) and stuck the dividing tape down, and continued until they’d finished unpacking their equipment and samples and had the lab in an almost workable condition.

  
  
Eventually they got bored of arguing and headed over to the mess hall. It was nowhere near as big as the one back at the Shatterdome. The crew on the Stella Navis was minimal, so in comparison this felt…cozy. Almost all the tables were full; no slinking off to their own table like usual. Newt supposed it would get quieter as people got busier, but for the first day aboard the ship everyone wanted to socialise.

He spotted a few free chairs over near Mako and she waved them over when she caught his eye. He’d always had a soft spot for her, as had Hermann; she’d been at the ‘Dome as long as they had, and had always been a curious teenager.

“I’m glad you guys are here,” She said, grinning as they dumped their trays on the table and took their seats in unison.

“Oh yeah, I’m real glad to be stuck sharing a lab with the worlds grouchiest physicist. Oh sorry, the universe’s grouchiest physicist now, Hermann!” Newt put on his most shit eating grin and slapped said grouchy physicist on the arm.

“You know, when the war ended I thought I’d finally be able to work in an environment where I was shown a little respect, but alas I’m still on toddler minding duty,” Hermann said snidely. Newt barked a laugh and bumped their shoulders together lightly.

Newt watched Mako and Raleigh interacting as he ate. They were perfectly in sync, reaching for their cups at the same time, mimicking each other’s posture and pausing to allow the other to finish their sentence without any kind of vocal cue. The latter reminded Newt of the perfectly coordinated rush of information he and Hermann had yelled down the microphone at LOCCENT right before the closing of the breach. Something had just clicked into place between them and they’d fallen into sync.

He watched Mako turn to ask Raleigh for the salt only for him to have already reached for it and have it ready for her, and wondered if this was how he and Hermann had looked to others the day of the breach closure.

He looked down at his tray to realised he’d forgotten cutlery, before he had the chance to sigh internally and stand up to go grab some, Hermann handed him a spoon. He smiled gratefully and tucked into his soup.

“So how’s space?” He said after swallowing. Mako covered a snigger with her hand and Hermann huffed and rolled his eyes. Newt bumped their knees together lightly under the table.

“Space is fine, we don’t know exactly what we’re going to be up against so we’re mostly just training and working on new moves and tactics,” Mako said.

“When I came back last time we were kinda thrown right into it, it’s nice to get some proper time in training this time,” Raleigh said. “How about you two? Managing to make any progress with nothing to work off?”

“It’s not nothing to work off,” Hermann said, “Though the minimal data isn’t helping matters I must admit. We’re mostly studying the breach as closely as we can and comparing it to the original data and hypothesising about any potential attacks. Newton is less used to working in the realm of predictive science,”

“Coming up with predictions based on practically nothing is Hermann’s thing. I like to have a hunk of kaiju in front of me before I start predicting the future,” Newt agreed, “this isn’t exactly the ideal way to work.” 

“I don’t *come up with predictions based on nothing*, you’ve seen my data for yourself, these predictions have their roots in hard evidence and my predictive model for the kaiju attacks alone had an eighty six percent accuracy rate.”

“An eighty six percent rate, did you hear that!” Newt said in the heavily English accented voice he reserved for mocking Hermann with.

Raleigh’s eyes flicked between them with mild amusement. “Ghost drift still gotcha’ then?”

“Hmm?” Was Newt’s intelligent answer through a mouthful of soup he’d managed to take at the worst possible moment.

“What makes you say that?” Hermann asked mildly accusatorially, lowering his spoon in sync with Newt’s.

“You’re just, I dunno, giving off a vibe,” He gestured between the two of them, “working in sync,” Newt and Hermann glanced to each other. Mako looked down, concealing a smile.

“So, did you guys know you were compatible before you drifted?” He continued. There was a soft thud from under the table and he winced, from which Newt gathered Mako had kicked his shin. He smirked.

“I, ah, hadn’t given it much consideration,” Hermann lied. Newt wasn’t quite sure how he knew it was a lie but he was sure of it. “But I suppose I’d always had an inkling,”

“I guess I’d always kinda thought we might be,” Newt said, “we were writing each other for years before we started working together, and we just got each other so well. I think I expected when we met we’d work together perfectly. Course then we did meet and practically hated each other on sight,” He laughed. It wasn’t really true; sure, they’d started up a screaming match in the middle of the lunch hall, Hermann had put in several official complaints, and Newt had badmouthed him to anyone willing to listen, but they’d come away from each fight cheeks flushed with exhilaration. They operated on the same wavelength, even if they used that wavelength to spar, and for the first time Newt had felt like he’d met his match.

“It was never even a question when it came to it, I suppose we each instinctively knew it would work. And even if it didn’t, it was the end of the world; there wasn’t really the time to be fussy,” Hermann continued. Mako was watching Newt with a small smile, he tried to ignore what he thought that could mean.

“I knew with Mako pretty much as soon as we met,” Raleigh looked at her with such fondness Newt had to look down at his bowl. “You know when you just talk to someone and it clicks? You guys work though, you’ve got to be very compatible to even be able to drift in the first place, and to pull it off successfully under such stressful circumstances-”

“Yes, thank you, Raleigh. We do know how the drift works,” Hermann coughs tightly. Newt conceals a snigger behind a dripping spoonful of tomato soup.

Hermann’s never really clicked with Raleigh, and Newton was outwardly hostile to him for a while when they didn’t see eye to eye on the best course of action for sealing the breach. Raleigh’s exactly the arrogant have-you-tried-blowing-it-up type of character they’ve both had to deal with putting them and their research down their entire lives. But he drifts with Mako, and there was that whole sacrificing himself to save the world based on instructions they’d frantically yelled into a microphone they’d wrestled Herc away from thing, so they do their best to get on with him.

  
Herc walked in just as Newt was screaming “Pluto is a planet, you fascist!” and hurling a piece of chalk across the lab to bounce off Hermann’s head.

“It was declassified in 2006 you imbecile, wanting it to be reclassified out of nothing but spite and immaturity doesn’t change the classification of planets by the International Astronomical Union.” Hermann yells back, “It is people like you signing petitions to change scientific classifications that completely-”

“Gentlemen!” Herc said, looking at the ceiling like he was bargaining with it for the strength to deal with mad scientists today.

“I trust I’m not interrupting anything important?”

Hermann lowered the cane he’d been brandishing at Newt, and Newt dropped the balled up disposable rubber glove he’d had primed to throw. They both had the decency to look embarrassed. Herc just sighed, he was well used to nonsense like this by now.

“Herc!” Newt says cheerfully, like he hadn’t been ready to ring his lab partner’s neck seconds before.

  
“Until we actually get a breach we can’t know anything for sure,” Newt explained, “but we can predict based on what we know about the previous kaiju. Hermannn you should be into this, you’re into wishy washy prediction based science,” Hermann glared at him over the top of his screen from the other side of the lab.

“So we know that kaiju categories one through five, all encountered kaiju so far in other words, have been amphibious, silicon based life forms. They still needed oxygen to breathe, whether they were taking it from the sea or from the air.

“This just doesn’t work in space. As far as we’ve encountered, there just isn’t the potential for lifeforms to survive in the vacuum. Now, if the precursors have worked out a way to get around that, it makes sense for the breach to be out here. Slopes the playing field. Sure, getting to the breach in a jaeger wasn’t ideal before, we’d wait for them to get close enough to land that we didn’t have to fight them underwater in general to avoid that. Theres no way for us to do that in space unless we’re willing to let them get all the way to earth and hope we can get to wherever they land fast enough, which given our resources is incredibly unlikely.

“Now if I were to speculate, thinking from the perspective of the precursors here-” Herc furrowed his brow slightly at that but Newt plowed on, “we build ourselves space suits so we can survive in space, right? Well we know the kaiju are clones,” He threw a pointed glare over his shoulder to Hermann who responded in kind, “and we know they were engineered by the precursors to be killing machines designed to wipe out the earth. So now they’re going for a new tactic - attacking from space. They need to design them in a way that works for the new terrain. Why not just do what we did? But instead of having to build the kaiju special suits, they can just build straight into the kaiju’s genetic makeup.”

“Get to the point,” Herc said, looking like he was resisting pinching the bridge of his nose. Newt spared a glance in Hermann’s direction and saw him shaking his head, lips pinched smugly.

“Secondary lungs.” Newt stated, pausing for dramatic effect. “Think about it, they already have secondary brains so they’re able to pilot such huge bodies. What are oxygen tanks? Essentially secondary lungs we’ve engineered for ourselves to store oxygen for us, so what if the precursors bioengineered secondary lungs directly into the kaiju capable of storing oxygen rich air to feed into the primary lungs so they can essentially breathe in a vacuum.”

“That’s smart, how’d you work that out?”

“It’s just a theory,” Newt said quickly. “But if I’m right then it gives us a point of attack. Cripple their oxygen supply and they’re done for. Way easier than going for the standard decapitation method, plus then I might actually get some intact samples to work with for once.”

“When fighting the kaiju the goal is not to keep them intact, it’s to take them down before they can cause any collateral damage.” Herc said cooly.

“I know that, but if you had a cleaner, more effective way to take out the kaiju then it’s less collateral, less jaeger damage, and more for me to work with. It’s a win, win, win.” Newt said, ticking the wins off on his fingers.

Herc begrudgingly tilted his head in agreement while Hermann rolled his eyes.

“Hermann, what you got?” Herc said, rounding on Hermann, who gave Newt a look that was meant to chastise him but just made him laugh.

“This breach is almost identical to the original one, it’s atomic in nature as was the first, and from what I can tell we won’t be able to pass through it ourselves, same as before. Though before we reach our destination there really is no way to tell. There doesn’t seem any reason for this breach to function any differently to the first, it is a tear in the fabric of our universe, and doesn’t require oxygen or atmosphere to power itself, to so speak, so it is able to be maintained in outer space no differently to the bottom of the ocean.

“There have been mild energy fluctuations, similar to those we saw in the original breach in periods in between attacks. Nothing of great significance yet however, these are just baseline readings rather than signs of an impending attack just yet.”

“That’s good news I suppose.”

“More or less. A kaiju attack is never something to hope for, but I fear before one we are in the dark.”

Herc hummed his grim agreement. “Well let’s just hope those bastards are the same as before, and that they can hold off till we’re there ready to head them off. God knows what’s coming, I only hope we’re prepared enough.”

“As do I.” Hermann agreed.

**Author's Note:**

> spot the sunny ref lmao
> 
> did I deadass forget about the existence of herc when i originally wrote this? maybe
> 
> The ship is based off the ones in The Martian and Interstellar just so you have a kinda visual reference of what I meant - I tried my best to describe it but idk if it came across properly - they're both based off how articifial gravity would really work in space, that's pretty much about as accurate as the science is probably going to get though so strap in. 
> 
> Stella Navis means Star Ship in latin~


End file.
